Das Reich (9 page)

Like most F Section officers, Hiller and Watney suffered a severe shock of disorientation and bewilderment when they landed. Only moments after the reception committee had greeted them, the two Englishmen were appalled to see the headlights of a car approaching up the road. They flung themselves into a ditch as it passed, then were bemused to see the little group of
résistants
still standing nonchalantly by the roadside in its headlights. Sten guns under their arms. The two Englishmen agreed that there was a wide gulf between security as taught at their tradecraft school at Beaulieu and as practised in France. From the dropping zone they were driven to Quatre Routes. They spent their first nights in a creamery at the edge of the little village, until Watney was moved to a safe house from which he could transmit, and Hiller began his travels among the
résistants
of the Lot.

Like many men who found themselves behind enemy lines in World War II, Hiller was profoundly moved by his experience in the spring and summer of 1944. In the timescale of those days, Liberation still seemed far away and the German command of France still appeared unshakable. Many Frenchmen and women – especially among the business and official classes – had long since come to terms with their Occupiers, and feared and hated the Resistance as communist bandits who threatened the peace and stability of their communities. By no means all the girls who slept with the men of the Das Reich and others of the occupying army
did so for money. Since the end of World War I, France had been a bitterly divided and fragmented society. ‘Her position’, Sir Denis Brogan has written, ‘was unique. She was a victor, but she had in many ways the psychology of a defeated nation.’ Many, perhaps most, French bourgeois in the 1930s feared fascism, far less than communism. Peasants were profoundly embittered by the ceaseless betrayals of their politicians. Their distaste for authority extended from contempt for Paris to hatred of their local landlords and parish priests. Religion was a waning influence in much of southern France by the 1940s. Most peasants, phlegmatically ploughing the fields and driving the oxen on their meagre farms, seemed to have set themselves apart from the war – indifferent both to the Allies and the Germans, concerned only with the crops and the seasons.

Yet beyond all these people, an utterly dedicated minority risked their lives, their families, everything they possessed to further the cause of Resistance. These were the men and women, whom he had never met before, to whom Hiller entrusted his own life. He was deeply moved by the strength of the bond created by the relationship between the hiders and the hidden. There was no common denominator among the
résistants
, except perhaps that their leaders in the Lot and the Dordogne seemed to come chiefly from the professional and small business classes, and were politically of the Left.

Jean and Marie Verlhac, already in their forties during the Occupation, were legendary
résistants
. Of fifty
parachutages
in their region, Jean organized the reception of nineteen. His wife Marie, a teacher who had been active for years in the trade union movement, was one of the brains and principal driving forces behind the growth of Resistance in the Lot. It was at their house that within days of his arrival Hiller prepared the charges for a local
résistant
to lay at the Ratier airscrew factory in Figeac, one of F Section’s most successful acts of sabotage of the war. In the weeks that followed, Hiller was passed on from the hands of the Verlhacs to those of other men and women who sheltered him as
he travelled through the region, meeting contacts and assessing the prospect of building upon them.

He spent many nights at the home of Georges Bru, a teacher in the little town of St Céré, a blunt, stocky figure with a genius for organizing and providing the unexpected. Late on those icy winter nights, Hiller would watch Bru come home blue with cold, his body wrapped with newspapers under his coat, after riding for hours around the region on his little moped on the business of the
réseau
. Despite an endless procession of clandestine visitors, his wife kept a spotless home, in which she seemed to be eternally cooking for her unexpected guests. Hiller watched fascinated as their two children did their homework at one end of the kitchen table, while the other was littered with explosives and Sten gun magazines. Sometimes the children cycled through the streets to look out for Germans or
miliciens.
It was uncanny how young they learned the reflexes of secrecy. One night, at the home of another schoolteacher in Figeac, named Odette Bach, Hiller was sitting in the kitchen when there was a knock at the front door. Pierrette, the Bachs’s five-year-old daughter, opened it to find a
gendarme
outside. He demanded whether anyone was at home. The child shook her head and replied unhesitatingly, ‘
Non, Monsieur
.’ The
gendarme
departed. Hiller breathed again. Even thirty-five years later, Pierrette could not explain how she had known that she must lie except to shrug: ‘
Il y avait un ambiance
. . .’ And she was still enough of a child to enjoy herself immensely one day when Hiller took her to the circus.

He marvelled at all these people, conscious of their fear, of all that they risked. The Bachs always seemed to him to be making a great effort to conceal their nervousness, yet their flat was known locally as ‘the stray dogs’ home’ because Odette would never turn away a fugitive from Vichy or the Germans. Odette and Hiller talked for hours about their common pacifist backgrounds. Then it would be time for her to leave to go to her class. It was difficult to come to terms with the relative normalcy of life: taxes were paid, people were married and baptized, the peasants continued
their simple lives sleeping on mattresses filled with maize, working in the fields in their blue smocks and black hats, shaving once a week on Sunday, baking bread in great wheels two feet across. Yet amidst all this, for Hiller and the
résistants
there was unceasing danger, the extra layer of clandestinity to add to all the practical difficulties of finding enough food to eat, renewing the endless permits for every aspect of daily life, and queueing for the simplest commodities.

The Germans were seldom seen outside the big towns. Occasionally a black Citroën would race down the road, and the village postmistress would telephone her counterpart a few kilometres away to warn her that Germans were on the way. Only Germans or agents of Vichy or the local doctor had access to petrol-driven cars. Perhaps twice a year, a village might suffer the passage of one of the notorious German punitive columns sent into the countryside wherever Resistance activity became conspicuous. The Dordogne suffered terribly from the attentions of Division B in 1943, and the Corrèze and Creuse from those of the Jesser column. That year 40,000 French men and women were arrested under suspicion of Resistance activities, and many of them had been deported to Germany, never to return. The risks for a British agent in the Lot or the Dordogne were less great than in Paris or Lyon. But the tension and fear, the certain knowledge of the price of capture, never altogether faded even in the happiest and most romantic moments of their secret lives. In notes for an uncompleted memoir of his experience with Resistance, Hiller scribbled long afterwards: ‘Explain how very ordinary people can do it . . . Many people were lifted out of their little lives, to be dropped down again afterwards . . . Show the mixture of tension and light fantastic . . . The extraordinary brotherhood, the immense enjoyment of being together, among ourselves, like children.’

Hiller likened his first weeks in France to learning to ride a bicycle – there was ‘a quality of strangeness and uncertainty, everyone working in a fog’. He was dismayed by the lack of force
displayed by some of the senior leaders of Resistance in the region, but conscious of his own lack of authority. His only influence sprang from his ability to conjure up money and arms. ‘We were working on a number of uncertain variables: The weather. The amount available for the drop. The lack of information about what was going on around us . . . The sense of isolation from London. The poor security.’ He found himself frustrated by the immense effort and time that had to be wasted upon petty personal logistics – finding safe houses for Watney and his transmitter; getting a
gazogène
charcoal-burning car for travel; passing messages and receiving answers even over short distances when he was constantly on the move. It took weeks to lose the screaming self-consciousness that afflicted him in a public place: ‘As I walked down the muddy high street with the debonair Jean at my side, I felt that everyone down to the dogs was staring at me. Loudspeakers were shouting: “Look at the Englishman, freshly arrived, there in the grey check suit with the brand-new beret!” ’

Soon after his arrival, one of the Groupes Vény’s colonels took him northwards to Limoges, the great grey metropolis of china manufacture, to talk to its local supporters. It was the first of many such trips: ‘Limoges was a dangerous town – small enough for most people to know each other, yet large enough for strangers to pass unobserved. And Limoges was plentifully supplied with Gestapo agents, not all of them natives of the town.’ Taillaux was the Groupes Vény’s principal contact in Limoges,

Hiller and the colonel slept at the railway station, inconspicuous among hundreds of other stranded wartime travellers and the incessant clanking of rolling stock through the night. The Englishman dozed, gazing at the colonel asleep beside him: ‘This old man with his patched-up body could have chosen to live on his pension in his flat in Nice, yet here he was with his worn shoes and his battered overcoat, sleeping in railway waiting-rooms and dodging the Germans. Luckily, he looked a harmless enough figure as he slept with his head near the red rosette of the Legion of Honour . . .’

As the weeks went by, Hiller’s admiration for the
résistants
did not diminish, but he began to perceive that their networks were far less powerful than London had supposed: ‘I had been there long enough for my initial optimism to have worn off. The whole organization was much weaker than I had imagined.’ As they built up the clandestine arms dumps with the fruits of the
parachutages
, he became conscious that there was no precise plan as to how they were to be used: ‘It was all rather vague, but then so were our ideas of what would happen after D-Day.’

Many of the
résistants
were simply not by temperament warlike people. They were men and women of great moral courage who sought to do whatever they could to oppose the Germans. But neither by background nor inclination were they killers. ‘It was not, on the whole, a heroic area,’ wrote Hiller. By this, of course, he did not seek to diminish the courage of local
résistants
, but to describe the difficulty of rousing the sleepy, rustic communities of the Lot to violent action. Hiller wrote later that he regretted wasting so much time on the movement’s internal quarrels and jealousies. Perhaps he should have ‘started fewer schemes and followed them through; should have been more concrete; [adopted]
a more aggressive policy, more firmness and ruthlessness’. He was too hard on himself. He did not know that his were the fortunes and difficulties of most Allied agents all over France.

Hiller also encountered the universal difficulty in handling the
maquis
– the groups of young
résistants
who lived entirely outside the law in the woods and hills. Most were young evaders from the STO, and some were more enthusiastic about avoiding forced labour than about taking part in positive action against the Germans. In the Lot, the most active and numerous
maquis
were those of the communist FTP, to whom many of the wilder spirits defected, tiring of the AS policy of patience until D-Day. Hiller wrote: